Recent developments in the Naxalite movement - communists in India

Monthly Review, Sept, 1993 by Tilak D. Gupta

III

In the Indian Marxist-Leninist movement of today, there is no doubt an element of continuity linking it to an earlier stage. As in the past, the contemporary M-L organizations, by and large, view Indian society as semicolonial and the Indian state as being run by the comprador-bureaucratic bourgeoisie and the big landlords. Based on these premises, they continue to envisage the building of a broad united front of all anti-imperialist and anti-feudal classes for accomplishing the people's democratic revolution, with agrarian revolution as its axis. Ideologically, these organizations persist in upholding Mao's thought as a development of Marxism- Leninism and steadfastly support the positions taken by the Communist Party of China in its great debate with the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in the 1960s. As in the past, they persevere in their conviction that the Naxalbari peasant upsurge signified a turning point in the Indian communist movement, a break with the revisionists. The reader will note that this theoretical structure inherited from the past has been borrowed from the Chinese. One must, however, add that there is now a growing awareness of the need to develop a specific theoretical model for the Indian revolution among the Indian Marxist- Leninists.

Going beyond this theoretical continuity which keeps the various groups together, the contemporary Marxist-Leninist movement has a new look in a number of ways. To begin with, the movement today is headed mainly by a new generation of leadership, most of whom began their political life in the post-Naxalbari period, inspired as they were by the call for an armed revolution in India. Police killings, arrests, torture in custody, and the rigors of a long underground existence have cut short the lives of many of the pioneers of the movement. Though a few of the old guard are still active, the change is conspicuous, with mixed consequences.

The geographical spread of the movement has also undergone significant change. West Bengal, the birthplace of the Naxalbari, no longer occupies a prominent place. The state, uninterruptedly ruled since 1977 by a Left Front government headed by the Communist Party of India (Marxist), has been hailed by many as a unique model of communists sharing power within a bourgeois form of democracy. Without detaining ourselves in an assessment of this experiment, which now seems to have entered a blind alley, suffice it to record that the reform program of the Left-Front government has so far been rather successful in blunting the Naxalite challenge in West Bengal. Meanwhile, as mentioned earlier, Bihar and Andhra Pradesh have emerged as the main theater for militant struggles of agricultural laborers and poor peasants. The Andhra struggle has spread to neighboring regions in Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh, and Crissa, and Marxist-Leninist organizations are quite active in parts of a number of other states. But there is no enduring agrarian movement of comparable intensity over large areas of those regions.